Instead of robbing or stealing directly, some criminals prefer to make fake bills - that way, not only do they not have to pay for whatever they're "buying", they get real money back as change. It can be anywhere from one dude operating a low-grade printer out of his garage to a gang using a top-end press making super-bills. Sometimes, this extends to creating fake coins as well.

Examples:

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Anime and Manga

One chapter of Detective Conan had Conan end up on the trail of a group of counterfeiters who had kidnapped one of his classmates' brothers; another had an old counterfeiter who'd hidden his work in an abandoned house when his conscience caught up to him.

"The Hunt for Greenback Jane" from Black Lagoon: Jane wanted to create the perfect counterfeit bills, The Cartel that employed her wasn't happy with the Schedule Slip that resulted from her belligerent perfectionism.

Zipang features the heroes producing a large amount of fake Imperial Japanese occupation currency (the so-called "banana currency") to discretely buy supplies with from the contemporary black market. In a sign of Values Dissonance, some of the 21st century sailors wonder about breaking the law and scheming the government even though they were transported to the middle of World War II.

This was the mystery of The Black Island in the eponymous Tintin adventure.

In one Lucky Luke story we meet the master counterfeiter Fenimore Buttercup, who would have been successful, had he not printed 3-dollar bills and signed them with his name! ("I am an artist! Shouldn't an artist sign his masterpieces?")

Invoked then averted in a Richie Rich short story where US government treasury agents suspect Richie of running a counterfeiting press. After breaking down the doors and handcuffing Richie, they then discover that all of the "notes" have Richie's photo along with "Play Money" printed clearly on them.

Agent #1: "Richie didn't say we have to repair the doors."

Agent #2: "You want his father to buy the mint and fire you?"

Invoked and averted again in another story where one of Richie's many uncles is highly eccentric and prints his own money, but averted when it turns out that Richie's dad has an arrangement with the people who deliver supplies to the uncle where Richie's dad will replace all of the uncle's "counterfeit" money with genuine currency.

Invoked and partly averted in a story where Richie's mischievous cousin Reggie Van Dough prints almost-perfect fake money to use to prank people with. The partial aversion comes about because Richie has an actor pose as a treasury agent to warn Reggie that he's actually breaking the law by pretending that the notes are real, even though he intended to give the people the same value in real money later.

In an All Just a Dream episode, Phineas gets a job as a printer. He starts printing fake bills, only for the FBI to burst in … but they're looking for pornography, and don't care about the cash, because "that stuff soon won't be worth the paper it's printed on."

The brothers get in trouble in Mexico. Don Longjuan The Yaqui Brujo uses some real notes, a pair of scissors and a colour photocopier to make high-value fake notes (e.g. US$25,000) to bribe them out. By the time the fakes are detected, the brothers are well away.

A Marvel issue of Hanna-Barbera's Dynomutt has him and Blue Falcon stopping the theft of some charity money by the Zoot Suit Brutes. They apparently jettison the money, which Dynomutt recovers. Later, Blue Falcon makes change out of a $100 bill with the charity money. As Radley Crown, he and Dynomutt are at a restaurant where Crown pays for dinner with a $20. It turns out the $20—and all the money still at the charity drive the Zoot Suit Brutes jettisoned—was counterfeit. Radley is unable to explain where he got the phony $20 for fear of giving away his secret identity. Dynomutt has to do some fast detective work to clear him.

During one sequence in Big Money Hustlas, the counterfeiter Bootleg Greg tries to pay his tithe to the crimelord Big Baby Sweets with counterfeit bills. Sweets's bodyguard kills him and flips his bills over - they're only printed on one side.

The events of the Ridley Scott film Black Rain are set in motion by a conspiracy by the Japanese Yakuza to distribute fake U.S. currency via The Mafia, only a renegade Yakuza steals the counterfeiting plates.

In the opening scenes of In the Line of Fire, US Secret Service agent Frank Horrigan (Clint Eastwood) and his partner are busting a counterfeiter group. In Real Life, as a part of the Treasury Department the Secret Service also handles financial fraud issues, as well as the protection service that's the focus of most of the film.

Count Sergius and his two fellow con artists are funding their lavish Monte Carlo lifestyle in Foolish Wives by passing counterfeit French banknotes.

Beverly Hills Cop III has a counterfeiting operation hidden inside a theme park. This eventually gets used in one of the most hilarious scenes of the film, in which Axel taunts the main bad guy by printing a roll of bills with his face and the words "Kiss My Ass" on them* Which is actually not a case of being petty, but rather a very valid method to use up the currency paper the counterfeiters had stolen: once something is printed on it, they can't very well use it again, and getting more was out of the question!

Though it doesn't appear in the film itself, the comic book and novel adaptations of Tim Burton's 1989 Batman film have the people of Gotham City find out that the "free cash" that the Joker was giving away at the city's 200th birthday celebration parade he was throwing was all counterfeit bills with the Joker's face on them.

In 5 Fingers James Mason plays a valet at the British Embassy in Turkey who sells secrets to the Germans. He is eventually discovered and runs, although his lover (a snooty countess he's pretty much bought with his money) runs off with much of the cash. It then turns out that the money they got from the Germans was counterfeit and she has been arrested and now the police are there for him. Man, if you can't trust the Nazis ...

In Mr. 880 (apparently based on a true story) a elderly counterfeiter manages to elude the Secret Service for 20 years because he just makes awful copies of $1 bills.

A Walk Among the Tombstones. When a Russian gangster's daughter is kidnapped and held for ransom, he doesn't have the million dollar ransom demanded, so makes up the amount with counterfeit cash. Despite his worries the cash turns out to be convincing enough...until one of the kidnappers is counting it and suddenly notices he has printers ink on his fingers. Violence ensues.

In Fredric Brown's short story "Don't Look Behind You", a man with a gift for printing is recruited to make plates to print counterfeit money.

Strata by Terry Pratchett has a future society that's sent into crisis when a counterfeit of their supposedly uncounterfeitable currency shows up.

One of several plots in The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers, has the villains trying to throw the UK into crisis by pouring counterfeit money into the banking system.

In the Provost's Dog, the slang term for such is 'coles' ('colesmiths' are counterfeiters). Due to its economic implications, the crime carries a heavy penalty- colesmiths are boiled in oil and anyone who passes fakes along gets one hand chopped off. Coles play a small role in the first book (a guard is said to have accepted coles in payment and Beka busts a minor colesmith), and are a major problem in the second, which deals with a large colesmithing ring in Port Caynn.

In Cold Fire, Frostpine is kept busy hunting down a counterfeiter, leaving Daja to deal with the main plot.

Sherlock Holmes, in The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb and The Adventure of the Three Garridebs.

In Good Omens, when one printer tells another that the current fad for books of prophecies is "a licence to print money", a footnote adds that the second printer's own thoughts on that subject eventually led to his arrest.

Owlswick the stamp forger in Making Money. At the end of the same book, Vetinari notes with amusement that the Times has printed lifesized images of the front and back of the new banknotes, to aid people in recognition, and tells Drumknott "even now, honest citizens are cutting them out and gluing them together".

In the Stephanie Plum novel Four to Score, counterfeit money proves to be very important to Stephanie finding her current skip (and in the process, accidentally helping Morelli with his current case).

In one of The Demon Princes books, Kirth Gerson finds out how currency is verified, and uses this knowledge to scam 10,000,000,000 SVU out of a kidnapping organization.

The final volume of The Baroque Cycle deals with the cat-and-mouse game between Master of the Mint Sir Isaac Newton and Jack Shaftoe, who has taken up making counterfeit gold Guineas.

Counterfeiting plays an important role in at least two of J.T. Edson's novels. In The Rebel Spy, the Union plans to flood the Confederacy with counterfeit cash to undermine its economy, while in Two Miles to the Border, a crook comes up with an elaborate scheme that involves robbing banks, swapping the stolen money for a similar amount of counterfeit cash, then abandoning the counterfeit cash so the bank thinks they have got their money back while the outlaws abscond with the real cash.

In the Horatio Hornblower short story, Hornblower and the Widow McCool, Hornblower discovers several bundles of banknotes in a secret compartment of a sailor's chest and suspects they were counterfeit, meant to support Irish revolutionaries, along with a propaganda letter and a list of confederates. He puts everything back and has the chest thrown overboard so as not to embarrass the officer who previously inspected the chest but missed the secret compartment. He later finds out the sailor was unwed, having lied to have his chest and an encoded poem sent to an address in Ireland to support further revolts.

In the Young Bond novel Heads You Die, the villains create great amounts of poisoned counterfeit banknotes, and attempt to flood England with them. It's all part of a grand evil plan to force them to become part of the Soviet Union.

The Stormlight Archive: The currency of choice has a built-in anti-counterfeit measure. Spheres are the most common form of money, and they take the form of small glass spheres with gemstones at the center. The size and color of the gem indicates its value. Real gems can hold Stormlight, but fake ones can't. Stormlight does fade over time, however, so dun spheres are theoretically as valuable as infused ones, but you might have to call in a moneychanger to make sure the gemstone is genuine. This causes some problems for the burgeoning Knights Radiant, who are subconsciously using Stormlight to fuel their abilities and don't understand why their spheres keep going dun.

In the Zeroes series, Coin's superpower lets him make people temporarily mistake blank paper for money. It affects people's minds rather than the money itself, absolutely convincing them that it's genuine no matter what test they subject it to... at least, right up until he leaves, at which point the power wears off and they realize what they're actually holding.

One episode of NUMB3RS dealt with an artist kidnapped to help a counterfeiter gang.

One episode in Fast Lane dealt with one of the Buddy Cops' father's old profession as a counterfeiter as a part of an infiltration job.

The BBC comedy-drama Private Schulz is based on a real-life Nazi plot to destabilize the British economy by flooding it with undetectable fake banknotes. In the series the title character recruits some Jewish prisoners to do the actual forgery (kind of like a more mercenary version of Schindler), and spends the rest of the war and afterward in various unsuccessful schemes to acquire some of the forged notes for himself.

Hawaii Five-O had an episode with an attempt to foil a plot to flood the market with near-perfect — for the time — counterfeit bills. This, of course, is less "I want to get stuff without paying for it" and more "I want to crush capitalism and set up a system where I — I mean, we all — can benefit."

Bottom had an episode featuring the production of genuine £27 notes, pornographic depictions of the Royal Family, "Welsh money" (triangular), and the infamous line "That's not the queen, it's Danny La Rue!" "Well, it's a queen..."

In one episode of Malcolm in the Middle, Malcolm finds out that his neighbors set up a block party in celebration of their annual vacation, which obviously upsets him. So he desperately tries to go around doing good deeds to help make his family (or at least him) less despicable. Sadly, he inadvertently helps someone else steal his neighbors' belongings. However, when the police arrive, he uses his eidetic memory to recite all the things that were stolen... which happen to be materials for printing stock certificates, which he quickly realizes.

Wiseguy. The protagonist uncovers a Government Conspiracy to ruin the Japanese economy with fake yen, and finds he's been set up to be the fall guy.

One episode of featured a mysterious case that was revealed to contain dollar plates. Rather than destroy the plates, the heroes "signed" them, making them Nazi dollars.

In the pilot episode, Hogan mentions that the prisoners have a counterfeiting operation running alongside all their other sabotage activities. They also mention that their fake German currency was of higher quality than the real thing.

In another episode the prisoners find out that the Germans are trying to print fake money (British five-pound notes and American twenties) at Stalag 13. They manage to trick one of the workers (who was against counterfeiting anyway) into thinking that as soon as enough money has been printed to ruin the economies of the Allied nations, he'll be killed. He then works with them to set the building on fire so the prisoners can run in and trash the place under the pretext of fighting the fire.

At least two episodes of Married... with Children feature the issue of counterfeit money. In one of them, Al and Griff blackmailed their boss. Because Al doesn't believe there are $100 bills, he thought she tried to trick him with fake money. In another one, Al tried to bribe Bud with Xeroxed bills and even moaned that each copy cost him eight cents. When Bud asked him about the original bill, Al realized he left it IN THE COPYMAKER.

In one episode of Psych, Shawn and Gus worked alongside a government agent and his own psychic to catch an international counterfeiter. Turns out that the psychic was in league with the forger.

A non-cash variety appears in the 60's Batman where the foreman of a stamp factory uses the place as front to counterfeit priceless rare stamps to sell to collectors. He was the only villain of the series to be remotely subtle and practical about his operation rather than flamboyantly evil. Batman only got wise to him as a result of the story being a Crossover with The Green Hornet, who had been investigating the fake stamps.

Mission: Impossible: The IMF have to stop counterfeiters and recover stolen printing plates in at least two episodes: "The Money Machine" and "Fool's Gold". (The episode "The Counterfeiter" is actually about someone manufacturing counterfeit drugs.)

Counterfeit cash plays an important role in the MacGyver (1985) episodes "Three for the Road" and "Rock the Cradle".

In the CBC teen consumer educational series, Street Cents, had the villain, Ken Pompadore, creating his own money for an episode to illustrate some concepts about currency. At the end of the episode, a Mountie (In full Red Serge uniform) appears to explain to Ken the crime of counterfeiting and tells him to gather his money up and get rid of it.

"The Night of Sudden Death" and "The Night of the Circus of Death" from The Wild Wild West. Since the main characters are Secret Service agents (and thus employed by the Department of the Treasury), this is technically the kind of thing they're supposed to be spending every episode investigating.

The Fortuna becomes the dropping-off point for counterfeit currency, unbeknownst to its owners, in "The Money Game."

Invoked then averted in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the new (and not entirely stable yet) government of a planet wants to "pay" the Federation for supplies by using their worthless (to the Federation) paper money. Averted when Riker points out that one of the supplies is a copier, and that it can copy their currency perfectly once it has local materials to work with and it can be easily programmed to change the serial numbers, and the Federation could always try to get the goods they want by trading with the new government's enemies... Cue the backdown from the new government.

A Christmas Episode of Only Fools and Horses, "To Hull and Back", had Del acting as a courier between Boycie and some Dutch diamond smugglers. Del quickly realises the cash Boycie gave him for the transaction is counterfeit. What he doesn't realise is that his own payment for services isn't fake, and the episode ends with him throwing it away.

On My Name Is Earl, this was apparently Joy's first major run-in with the law. She took a dollar bill and tried to photocopy it.

Joy: Excuse me, can I get some more green ink in this machine?

Kenny: Is that...are you...counterfeiting?!

Joy: Shh! Keep quiet about this, and I'll make it worth your while.

Kenny: I can't allow you to do that! COPY RESPONSIBLY! COPY RESPONSIBLY!

On Leverage the team goes undercover at a greeting card company to investigate possible fraud. They initially think that someone is making fake orders for supplies and pocketing the money but they find that the supplies all arrived as ordered. They then discover that the supplies and equipment ordered were of much higher quantity than needed for printing greeting cards. An employee was running a counterfeit operation and tricking the clueless owner of the company into buying all the supplies for it.

One suspect in Barney Miller is an elderly man who only counterfeits small bills so he can pay for groceries and such in between Social Security checks. He's caught when his failing eyesight results in a Lincoln wearing a leisure suit—very embarrassing.

In Goodnight Sweetheart, Gary's friend Ron is a printer who creates white fivers for him to take back to the 1940s.

In an episode The Honeymooners counterfeiters leave a briefcase on Ralph Kramden's bus. Afraid to claim it and get caught they wait until the waiting period is over and Ralph gets it. By the time they catch up to him, he's opened the briefcase and is living like a king.

In Copper, counterfeiting is the main racket of the Druids gang, which Maguire joins after he is booted off the force in season 2.

That Mitchell and Webb Look:A one-off sketch has a counterfeiter proudly displaying his newly minted counterfeit ten pound notes. Which are the wrong size, the wrong colour, have the wrong queen on them (Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands), and the maker has managed to flub writing the word "pounds". He insists to his boss that no-one will notice the difference.

The Dukes of Hazzard addresses this one a few times. In one particular incident, the counterfeiting was done by an elderly widow that the Hazzard boys agreed to be silent about.

Referenced in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, where Will's friends Jazz and Tyriq get mad at each other — Tyriq is mad that Jazz tried to sell him a counterfeit Rolex watch, and Jazz is mad that Tyriq paid for it with a fake $20 bill with Jermaine Jackson's face on it. Will chides them both, saying that they both ought to recognize fake goods when they see them.

In one episode of The Office (US), Creed hands Jim a $3 bill with George W Bush's face on it.

And on sister series Parks and Recreation, when Tom and Jean-Ralphio started Entertainment 720, they acquired a printing press to make fake money with their faces and the e720 logo on it; their plan was to promote their business at clubs by tossing the bills in the air screaming "FREE MONEY!"

Music

In one Ray Stevens music video, "Obama Budget Plan", Ray and his family decide to end their financial problems by printing up all the money they could ever need. The music video ends with them getting sent to jail.

Newspaper Comics

During one arc in Thimble Theater, Popeye and King Blozo discover a counterfeiter and have him arrested. However, because Blozo's country is in a financial crisis, the king decides to make the fake money legal tender. Popeye points out that it's still worthless because there's nothing backing it.

Tabletop Games

One issue of Dragon Magazine included a "Top Secret" scenario in which the PCs need to infiltrate an underwater base and stop a counterfeiting plot. Promptly averted when they learn that someone dropped the plates, leaving an obvious crack across them and making them useless. (That someone is being tortured to death in the airlock when the PCs arrive.)

In Exalted, counterfeiting is less common in the Realm than simply keeping and trading in unmarked blocks of jade, since the penalty is much less harsh (five years in prison against death).

Video Games

The Sims 2 University offers a counterfeiting machine as one of the aspiration rewards. If it's used by a sim whose aspiration level is below gold, there's a chance a cop may show up to fine the sim and disable the machine. Also, after about three hours of continuous use, the machine will eventually catch on fire and destroy the counterfeit money, regardless of aspiration level. The money produced by the money trees in both The Sims 2 and The Sims 3 could arguably count as "counterfeit" as well.

Dimitri's operation in Sly 2: Band of Thieves, using Clockwerk's wail feathers as printing plates for his counterfit cash print. Gentleman Thief Sly is shocked that someone could stoop as low as printing their own money.

Tommy Vercetti finds himself owning a printer's shop in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. For a career criminal building an empire, it was NOT his idea to start. Doesn't mean it stops him from going along with it. Or trying to pay off his former boss with fake bills.

In Ace Attorney Investigations, the crime ring Edgeworth exposed was dabbling in counterfeiting Zheng Fa bills. This is why Interpol Agent Shi-Long Lang is persistent, as he's from Zheng Fa and the fake money is ruining his homeland's economy due to the difficulty of distinguishing between the real and fakes.

Implied in the intro to Postal 2: Apocalypse Weekend: "Guess I need to make some money, but my printer's all out of ink."

A potential quest in Fallout: New Vegas involves being hired by the Crimson Caravan Company to shut down a counterfeit bottle cap press (old Nuka-Cola and Sunset Sarsaparilla caps are legal tender in the western wasteland, backed by water merchants). If you find any counterfeit caps, they have a value of 0, suggesting that the Courier is savvy enough to identify them as fakes. Despite this, at least one mod exists that allows you to lie about destroying the press and use it to make your own counterfeit currency.

A massive counterfeiting scheme is at the centre of the plot of True Crime: Streets of L.A.. The notes are of such high duplicity because they're actually printed with the Swiss-made plates used for the real thing and purchased by the North Korean government to supply to Russian gangsters. The North Koreans were hoping to undermine the American economy, but the mobsters just use it to finance their own operations.

Anti-Idle: The Game has the Printer, which prints "illegal" Coins. Subverted, in that these Coins are functionally the same as "honest" Coins.

The Counterfeit mission in PAYDAY: The Heist naturally has the crew hitting a money printing operation for their own gain. More specifically, the target is a pair of neighbors - Mitchell and Wilson - who are making a killing through joint use of a counterfeit money printer hidden in an underground room connected to both of their basements. The goal of the mission is to take their money printing plates and scram, though the remake in the sequel allows the crew to use the money printer, and Mitchell and Wilson's endless supply of printer ink and paper, to make as much fake cash as they'd like.

In the test log for SCP-261, a vending machine that produces anomalous "snacks" when given money, someone put a counterfeit 500-yen coin into the coin slot. They got a bag of cyanide-laced gummy birds for their troubles.

One researcher tried to use SCP-1147, a collection of plum tree seeds that mutate depending on what they're grown in (for example, growing the seeds in a glass sphere results in a colored glass tree), with mixed currency bills as the soil. They end up with a tree that produces bill-like leaves, none of which can pass for real currency.

Webcomics

Referenced in The Order of the Stick, when the demon roaches complain about the Monster in the Darkness trying to place bets with Monopoly money. The MotD replies "But it's real Monopoly money this time! I've learned my lesson!"

Western Animation

In the Joe Oriolo Felix the Cat episode "Instant Money", The Professor creates a formula that allows water to be turned into gold coins. Unfortunately, Rock Bottom blows the scheme by messing around with the water pipes in a way that sends the money to Felix instead. Professor and Rock Bottom resort to breaking into Felix's house to fix their mistake, but Felix finds out about their counterfeiting rig and immediately calls the police on them, getting Professor and Rock Bottom arrested. On top of that, Professor can't repeat it again because Rock Bottom had mistakenly burned the papers with the formula beforehand.

Apparently, Lois from Family Guy has been printing counterfeit $20 bills for years.

An episode of Bananaman had the titular superhero busting a counterfeiting operation. At one point, he examines a counterfeit banknote and marvels that he'd never have been able to tell it was a fake — prompting one of his long-suffering associates to point out that it has a face value of £7.

The Flintstones: Barney once played a practical joke on Fred by building a fake counterfeiting press (the bills it "printed" being real money Barney won in a contest). Hilarity Ensues.

In another episode, Betty Rubble gets a job as an old lady running errands for a handicapped woman. Betty was given $100 bills to make purchases no more than a loaf of bread. The bills were counterfeit as part of a press set up by the woman for whom Betty is working. When Betty and gang realize what she is being manipulated into doing, they try to trap the counterfeiters by handing over one of the phony bills, but are too dumb to suspect that the crooks are on to them when the woman inexplicably gives Betty a mere $20 bill. That turns out to be legal tender so the police don't believe their story of a counterfeiting operation when they turn it in.

The villain's plan in the Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! episode "The Backstage Rage", in which he printed up counterfeit money underneath a theater and smuggled it in violin cases.

A non-cash variety appears in a story arc of Rocky and Bullwinkle, Boris and Natasha are mass-producing counterfeit boxtops. The two spend boxtops on goods in every store that can be traded in for boxtops and crippling the economy. This arc had to be Cut Short due to complaints from General Mills, which was sponsoring the show.

Played straight in the Ed, Edd n Eddy episode "Laugh Ed Laugh", where Eddy's Sanity Slippage after learning there are no kids for him to scam is cured after he finds a pile of money. His zeal, of course, dissipates when he finds that it's really all fake dollar bills with Ed's face drawn on them.

The Little Rascals episode "All the Loot That's Fit to Print" had the Rascals start their own newspaper, using a printing press that they didn't know was already being used by a counterfeiter. When Alfalfa found some of the counterfeit currency, he spent it, assuming that it was genuine. The counterfeiter was a rather stupid crook who put his own face on the money. It was rather easy for the police to pin him to the crime when he was caught.

The Sea Hag and Bluto were pretty stupid, too, counterfeiting $3 bills. (For any foreign Tropers reading, there's no such thing.) The portrait on the front was that of Benedict Arnold in the process of being hanged. Popeye and Olive quickly realized it was fake; Wimpy, however, fell for it quickly.

One episode of Darkwing Duck featured Bushroot developing a money tree that grew counterfeit bills. In addition, when the bills were placed into vaults, they would sprout into vines and carry the safes full of real bills back to Bushroot.

One episode of Biker Mice from Mars featured the mice learning that Lawrence Limburger was using counterfeit money. At least until they destroyed his printing facility.

One episode of Inch High, Private Eye featured robbers who left counterfeit money, including counterfeit coins, in place of the real money they stole.

In Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, Chuckie Sol, the first gangster victim of the Phantasm, intended to launder a briefcase full of the high-grade variety in his casino before his encounter with Batman (and Phantasm).

It is also revealed in the infamous "One Coarse Meal" episode that Mr. Krabs pays his employees in counterfeit money, known as "Mr. Krabs' Wacky Bucks◊".

The Fillmore! episode "Immune to All But Justice" featured a counterfeit baseball card ring.

Beavis And Butthead attempted this once and failed miserably, as they do at everything. They spent 1 real dollar to make 10 photocopies of that dollar. They were black-and-white, one sided copies on ordinary paper which were cut out extremely poorly. The duo then tried to photocopy coins. When they tried to spend this "money", they got tossed out of the store, then went back to the copy shop and tried to spend the fake money to make even more fake money.

In one episode of The Dick Tracy Show, Joe Jitsu was after a suspected counterfeiting ring. His suspicions were heightened when he knocked on the door and asked for change for a 10-dollar bill ... and got back a $7 bill and a $3 bill.

In one episode of Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales, Tennesee and Chumley decided to go into the printing business. Their first customers were thinly veiled Chicago gangsters who wanted them to print up pictures of "Washington, in green ink."

Besides the "Stan Bucks" Grunkle Stan of Gravity Falls uses to pay for Summerween decorations, at one point he had Dipper and Mabel attempt to counterfeit real money, with minor success.

One episode of Goof Troop had a gang of counterfeiters mistake Goofy for a member of their gang who looked just like him and gave them an enormous amount of fake cash to launder. Since Goofy had no understanding of what was really going on and was starting up a paper-hanging business, he spent it all on wallpaper.

In one Von Drake's House of Genius short, Ludwig Von Drake created a money duplicating machine in order to end poverty. Unfortunately for him, that counted as counterfeiting and he got arrested.

In one Lilo & Stitch: The Series episode, Jumbaa created a machine to make money in order to help Nami's financial problems. No one pointed out to him that was counterfeiting, but since the machine was destroyed before any money was spent, it didn't really matter.

There's this poor but not so honest farmer who's so poor he's practically forgotten what money looks like. He finally decides that the only way he's going to get any money is to print his own, but he's a bit vague about the denomination he should print, so he finally settles on a fifteen-dollar note. He takes his freshly minted note to the store and gets some items. The shopkeeper says "That's exactly three dollars" and the farmer hands over his fifteen-dollar note. The shopkeeper looks at the note, looks at the farmer, looks and the note again, looks at the farmer again and finally says "How do you want your change? A nine and a three, or two sixes?"

Real Life

Governments absolutely despise counterfeit currency for a large number of reasons, but the most common is the fact that counterfeiting is a dangerously inflationary action: with more hard currency in circulation, the "rarity" of said currency is diminished, and prices go up as a result (in other words, $100 is not worth as much when there's a lot of $100 bills available).note Something you may not know: in the United States, at least, it's perfectly legal to mint your own money. What's illegal is attempting to pass it off as money issued by the U.S. government. Unchecked, counterfeiting can absolutely devastate a country's economy, both internally as people keep demanding higher and higher prices, and externally, as other countries will view the currency (and the country's economic backing of said currency) as essentially worthless.

The Tasty Gold trope of biting into money to check its authenticity is Truth in Television. Back in the days of gold coinage, if the coin wasn't soft enough it had probably been alloyed with some cheaper metal, making the coin harder. On the other hand, if the coin was too soft, then the coin had been alloyed with lead, which actually made the coin softer (but again less valuable).

Archimedes' famous discovery happened because of this: the king wanted a way to determine whether his crown was pure gold, or whether its composition had been mixed with other shiny metals—but he didn't want to bite his beautiful crown. What Archimedes realized was that if you mix base metals into the gold, the result will occupy more volume than the same weight in pure gold (since gold is denser than most metals it would be alloyed with). Dip the item in question into water and mark how far the water rises. Dip the same weight of gold into the water. If the item is made of pure gold, the water will rise by the same level. If the item is fake, the water won't rise as far when the pure gold is immersed.

There was an infamous counterfeiter who was known as the Omega man. The only flaw in the coins he made was a tiny Greek letter he added to them.

Apocryphally a sting operation once used a machine that took in pieces of green paper and spat out perfect $20 bills. The secret, of course, was that the "green pieces of paper" were $20 bills.

This has been used as a practical joke and in "hidden camera" shows.

Another version of the trick has the crook selling the "money making machine" to a sucker (answering the obvious question by claiming that he needs a lot of money now and the machine is too slow). When the mark realizes he's been had, he's unlikely to report his own attempt to get into the counterfeiting business.

In some versions, the mark does report the case... only to get more years than the seller.

There have been artists such as J.S.G. Boggs who specialize in drawing the front of a US $100 bill, and then sell it as art for $100 worth of goods & services. Several were investigated for counterfeiting and/or forgery.

Günter Hopfinger produced about 300 1.000 DM notes that way.

Wesley Weber and his friends made a fortune producing counterfeit $100 bills. They made so many of them, in fact, that many retail outlets in Canada would not accept $100 bills. The Canadian mint actually had to do a major redesign of the bills. As he was busted in 2001 and $100 bills aren't al that common, the style of bills he counterfeited have virtually disappeared from circulation altogether—but not from law enforcement classrooms, as the Weber Bill is still a test case in counterfeit detection.

William Chaloner, a seventeenth century coiner and forger, who became the bane of Sir Issac Newton's existence during the scientist's career as Master of the Mint.

Ironically, Newton's Master of the Mint post was, at the time, essentially a sinecure — a form of stipend to give him funding and spare time for more scientific work. Newton, however, took his new responsibilities seriously, and made several important innovations in minting.

The Swazi lilangeni is an accidental version; despite having a different design, it has exactly the same composition and shape as a pound sterling coin. It only has a face value of around 10p (depending on the rate of exchange) and can be passed off as pound coins to people who aren't paying attention (or machines).

As mentioned in the Ridiculous Exchange Rates trope, counterfeiting was endemic during the Russian Civil War. The Kerenki Ruble banknotes made by the provisional government were of such laughably poor quality that anyone with a storebought home printing apparatus could make indistinguishable copies. And they did. This devalued the currency so badly that both the counterfeiters and the mints didn't bother to cut them into individual banknotes and released them as 1x1 metre sheets to save time.

Releasing counterfeit money into an enemy country to undermine its economy is a popular war tactic. The most infamous example would probably be during The American Civil War, where the Union flooded the south with millions in bogus Confederate cash. Whether this worked or not is debatable. Most of the fake bills were instantly recognizable because they looked too good, but many retailers still accepted them because the Confederate Dollar was already suffering from Ridiculous Exchange Rates, anyway.

Counterfeit Money is a frequent problem in China. However, only higher-value notes tend to be counterfeited. This results with an odd situation where the jiao (RMB equivalent of cents) notes are much lower in quality than the yuan notes, their texture almost resembling counterfeited money. The idea is that the jiaoare worth so little that nobody would bother counterfeiting them anyway.

An interesting variation occurred when a woman tried to pass off a novelty $1 million bill at a Walmart in Georgia. She claims that she thought the bill was real, which if true means that she deserved what she got. Not exactly counterfeiting in the traditional sense, but it's noteworthy that the novelty bills in question got pulled from stores immediately thereafter. Unintentional counterfeiting?

In an interesting inversion, a Swedish artist coined nine 10 SEK (a bit more than 1 USD) coins, that are normally made from a gold-colored alloy, of pure gold, marked them with an almost invisible mark, and put them into circulation.

Operation Bernhard was a secret Nazi plan during World War II intended to destabilize the British and American economies by flooding them with forged notes. The plan was never fully realized and most of the forgeries were dumped in a lake. However some of the notes were used to make pay for such things as secret imports from neutral countries and payments to secret agents operating in Allied countries.

Emerich Juettner got away with counterfeiting for a decade (from 1937 to 1947) despite the poor quality of his fakes (printed on ordinary paper, with badly reproduced graphics and Washington's name misspelled) because he printed only modest amounts of fake money, because he never used the fakes at the same place twice (out of an odd personal sense of honor), and because people rarely pay much attention to one-dollar bills. (Even when people did notice, they often preferred to keep the bogus bill as a souvenir rather than report it.) His odd pattern of passing bills (much different from the M.O. of most counterfeiters) baffled the U.S. Secret Service for years. He finally got caught when there was a fire in his apartment and his equipment got tossed into the street by the firemen.

Possibly an urban legend, but according to several sources, back before the fall of the Shah of Iran, the US was helping the country modernize their currency system, supplying intaglio presses, the fancy paper with red and blue threads in, and even sample $20 plates to show how the serial numbers worked. Then came the Iranian revolution. Some large proportion of $20s were said to be these indistinguishable "Superdollars", but supposedly changing things would have been too difficult until the redesign in 1998.

There's another urban legend floating around about someone who successfully passed a $200 bill with George W. Bush's face on it. (Bush does not appear on any currency—living persons are forbidden from appearing on US currency—and the US Treasury Department does not print a $200 bill).

There have been reports that stores have refused to accept $2 bills (a valid but not commonly used bill) simply because the clerk didn't know that they were real.

Similarly to the $2 bill example, Scottish pound notes (which are technically not legal tender, even in Scotlandnote They're promissory notes issued by commercial banks; one of the reasons the UK didn't sign up to the Euro was that Scotland would lose the right to print them., but have a 1 to 1 exchange rate with English pounds) are allegedly sometimes rejected because they're mistaken for forgeries (or conversely - since Scotland still has paper £1 notes - they hand one over and get change for a fiver), although it's just as often because a lack of familiarity makes it harder to spot forgeries (the further south you go, the less likely Scottish currency is to be accepted). The latter is also true of £50 notes of either denomination (which normally only crop up in birthday cards or suspiciously large cash payouts).

In a case that combined this with criminal carelessness (carelessness by criminals as well as carelessness that is criminal), Italian police seized 125 billion in counterfeit $500 million and $1 billion U.S. bearer bonds. No U.S. bearer bonds have been issued over $10,000.

The adage "Don't take any wooden nickels!" dates from The Great Depression, when counterfeiters would cut out little nickel-sized discs of wood and paint them so that they resembled a nickel if you didn't look too closely. One way to tell the difference was to bite on the coin; the 75% copper 25% nickel alloy of an actual five-cent piece is pretty hard against the teeth, but wood has some give to it and will allow you to leave tooth marks in it.

Or the alternative explanation: Shops would occasionally distribute promotional wooden tokens worth "five cents in trade at X's store". The catch being that if the shop went out of business, the tokens would become worthless.

There were multiple cases in the 19th Century of people gilding nickels, tricking people into believing that they were five dollar coins. The person to try this actually got away with it, because 1: There was no law against gilding currency at the time (This was quickly corrected), and 2: He only bought 5 cent items with his gilded nickels, thus if the store clerk gave him $4.95 change, it was arguably an error on the part of the clerk.

The Zero Rupee Note is a rare case of fake money being worth face value: Zip. It's used to "bribe" government officials in order to shame them for their greed and corruption. It's also printed in such a way to make it clear it's not really money (the reverse has information on the organization that produces them and looks nothing like currency).

Joshua Norton, after he went insane from losing all his money in a scheme to corner the rice market, reinvented himself as "Norton the First, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico". He produced his own currency, for just enough to eat and live, and the people of San Francisco were kind enough to appreciate his weirdness and take the money.

As an aside: US currency is among the most difficult to counterfeit in the world. The exact security methods are both well-known and secret: there's a watermark in every bill* Hold it up to the light and look for the image of the President; there are "miscolored" threads in each bill* the exact number of threads in each denomination is not disclosed; a plastic strip is embedded in the "paper"* Again, hold it up to the light. It should say "US $100" or whatever the amount of the bill is; the "paper" is made from a proprietary mix of linen and cotton* With a unique "feel" or texture. The paper a dollar is printed on does not feel like any other kind of currency paper, and even more than the security measures, supposedly the texture of the paper is almost impossible to duplicate. And that's just in the paper itself: the ink is a whole other story. The official estimate of counterfeit bills to actual bills is 1 in every 10,000. Counterfeits do exist, however. The US Treasury calls them "Superbills", as they are almost completely indistinguishable from real bills (the so-called superbill from Rush Hour 2, which can only be identified when burned, is not far from the truth). Most counterfeit cash comes out of North Korea, which managed to get a set of legitimate US current printing plates several decades ago.

Which compares well with current Australian currency, which is printed on clear plastic and deliberately leaves a small area clear but impressed with the denomination so that copying onto paper will be easily detected. And the serial numbers are overprinted with a dye which is only visible under UV light, and the denomination is repeat printed over a background area in UV dye. And the ink is printed thickly enough to make the currency uniquely tactile. And the denomination of the bill is printed in practically microscopic characters as part of the background. And that's only the security devices they've told the general public about. The general idea is to make printing perfect copies too expensive on a small scale.

The USD $2 bill is in a league of its own. Perfectly legal, still printed, legal tender. However, the rarity of its usage garners attention. Odds are just shy of even that trying to use them to pay for something will get the holder questioned, if not denied service. Vending machines aren't even programmed to take them. The upshot being great for collectors as the bills often show very little wear for their age.

One urban legend tells of a person trying to pay for goods at a shopping mall using several $2 bills only to have security called on them and being accused of outright counterfeiting. The security guard, being a gentleman slightly older than the shopkeepers, is dumbfounded at the stupidity of the situation.

Another joke, told by a comedian, suggests trying to pay for an Extra Value Meal with a fist full of $2 bills if one would like to see a whole McDonald's franchise grind to a halt and possibly have the police involved.

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